With the development and proliferation of online tools and networking capabilities of desktop applications such as word processing applications, spreadsheet applications, presentation applications, and the like, online collaboration has become a real and necessary part of daily life. Many organizations employ people who may be in different physical and geographical locations, but using online collaboration teams do not have physical boundaries anymore.
Typical online collaboration involves sharing of documents and other content with a backbone system providing necessary tracking and conflict resolution services when two or more people work on the same document or other content. Software code may be written and tested by a number people who collaborate online meaning, they can make changes to the code being developed collectively without losing track of who made which change.
Another aspect of online collaboration is online communication. While conventional phone and/or video conferencing systems exist, online meeting systems are increasingly complementing or replacing those conventional methods. In an online meeting, participants can not only exchange messages (voice, text, video, etc.), but they can also work on one or more documents while communicating with each other. Thus, online meetings are becoming a significant part of online collaboration. However, existing technology typically treats online or otherwise communications (e.g. online meetings) separately from other forms of collaboration. For example, a team may have a shared workspace where documents are collectively worked on. When the same team holds an online meeting, the meeting records, changes to any documents or newly created documents have to be manually moved to the shared workspace resulting in a broken up collaborative experience.